The congregation at England’s Truro Cathedral is replacing a regular Sunday evening service with a gospel show featuring an Elvis Presley impersonator.
The cathedral, concerned about the “limited appeal” of its traditional evensong services, has moved the regular services to earlier in the evening to make room for “alternative” services in the 6:30 p.m. time slot, the Telegraph reported Friday.
The latest in the series is “His Hand in Mine: An Inspirational Evening of Elvis Presley’s Gospel Music,” starring Johnny Cowling as the King, performing such classics as “Peace in the Valley” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”
Canon Perran Gay said the alternative services were an attempt to draw more people to the cathedral.
“We were concerned that we weren’t reaching people who aren’t drawn to traditional services, so we decided to consider alternative ways of worship,” Gay said. “We are confident in our numbers to try something slightly wacky. This is just one of many authentic ways of worshipping God.”
Past alternative services at the church have involved jazz sessions, country music-singing cowboys and line dancing.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 7:11 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.You must be logged in to post a comment.